stunning images couldn't make Days of Heaven a coherent dramatic whole, and they can't do it for The Thin Red Line.

| Apr 2, 2019

The film is a gorgeous garland on an unknown soldier's grave.

| Apr 1, 2019

There has truly never been a film about modern war quite like this one: a kind of lyric epic poem about the way men are transformed for good by the experience of war, carefully balancing romanticism and dispassion, action and introspection.

| Apr 10, 2018

Ultimately concerned less with specific tactical maneuvers or combat suffering than with the grand contradictions of life.

| Original Score: A | May 11, 2011

The Thin Red Line's hallucinatory blend of images defines the very essence of cinema.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Apr 20, 2011

It's a genuinely epic ciné-poem that essentially sidesteps history, politics and conventional ethics to deal with war as an absolute, inevitable and eternal facet of existence.

| Feb 9, 2006

| Original Score: 3/4 | Apr 25, 2003

| Original Score: 4/4 | Jun 18, 2002

Whatever its ideological bias or historical oversights, The Thin Red Line is hugely effective as a film about the absurdity of war.

| Mar 5, 2002

| Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 14, 2001

A complex, highly talented work marked by intellectual and philosophical ambitions!

Full Review | Jan 1, 2000

Intermittently brilliant!

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Jan 1, 2000

Takes war to a stirring level!

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4 | Jan 1, 2000

Dispenses with plot, characterization, dramatic structure and emotional payoffs in favor of the sort of painstakingly composed pictorial diddling that invariably gets critics frothing about the director's "indelible" images.

| Jan 1, 2000

The thinking person's Saving Private Ryan.

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | Jan 1, 2000

It wrestles with complexity, speaks to us in poetry, weaves multiple narrative strands into a tapestry, opens the festering wounds of war and gazes inside without blinking.

Full Review | Jan 1, 2000

An uncannily timed movie phenomenon!

Full Review | Jan 1, 2000

The Thin Red Line is an epic aestheticization of World War II, a movie at once bold and baffling, immediate and abstract.

| Original Score: B- | Jan 1, 2000

Fascinating!

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jan 1, 2000

Despite this film's narrative lapses, Malick has a unique way of distilling the poetry from the commonplace ... and for that precious gift we should say amen.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Jan 1, 2000